ADA Compliance for Ecommerce: What Shopify Store Owners Need to Know

Priya is blind. She's been using a screen reader since she was nineteen and she shops online the same way most people do — frequently, often late at night, usually on her phone.

Last December she was trying to buy a birthday gift for her sister. She found a small online clothing store, liked the look of a few items, and tried to add one to her cart. The "Add to Cart" button had no accessible label. Her screen reader announced it as "button" — nothing more. She didn't know if she'd added something or nothing, whether she was on the right product, or what size she'd selected. She tried to navigate to the cart to check. The cart widget opened as a modal that trapped her screen reader's focus — she couldn't get out of it without reloading the page.

She closed the tab and bought the gift somewhere else.

The store owner never knew she visited. They never knew she left. And they have no idea that the same experience happens to a meaningful share of their customers every single day.

I'm Laura, co-founder of AccessBridge. We help online businesses find and document accessibility issues on their websites. Ecommerce is where we see the highest concentration of ADA lawsuits — and Shopify is the most-targeted platform of all. This post is for store owners who want to understand what they're actually exposed to and what it would take to reduce that exposure.

Why Ecommerce Is the Highest-Risk Category

Of all the sectors facing ADA website litigation, ecommerce carries the greatest exposure. Retail accounts for 77.5% of all ADA web accessibility lawsuits. That figure has held steady for several years, and it makes sense when you think about it: an online store is inherently transactional. Every step — browsing products, reading descriptions, selecting options, completing a checkout — is a potential barrier for someone with a disability. And every barrier is a potential claim.

New York, Florida, and California still account for over 74% of ADA website lawsuits. If your store ships to those states — and most do — you're within reach of the law firms that file these cases.

The other thing worth knowing: 64% of ADA website lawsuits targeted companies with annual revenues under $25 million. Smaller businesses settle quickly and are less likely to mount a defence. That makes them frequent targets. Running a small Shopify store doesn't reduce your exposure — it increases it.

The Shopify-Specific Problem

Shopify is the most accessible major ecommerce platform in terms of its base code. That's genuinely good news. The problem is that a base Shopify install is not what most stores look like after six months of customisation.

Shopify stores accounted for 32.42% of lawsuits by platform in early 2025, second only to custom-coded websites at 34.73%. The reason isn't that Shopify is poorly built — it's that every theme customisation, every third-party app, and every piece of product content added by the store owner is an opportunity to introduce violations that Shopify's core code never caused.

Apps from the Shopify App Store are not reviewed for accessibility before approval. A review widget that injects inaccessible star ratings, a pop-up email capture that traps keyboard focus, or an upsell carousel without ARIA labels — each one becomes a potential WCAG failure that plaintiff firms can cite in a demand letter.

Shopify gives you a better starting point than most platforms. It doesn't give you a compliant store. The content and customisations are yours to get right.

Where the Violations Actually Live

Based on accessibility scan data across ecommerce sites, violations cluster in a few predictable places.

Product images without alt text. Every product photo needs a text description so screen reader users can understand what they're looking at. On a store with hundreds of products, this is often the single largest source of violations — and one of the most straightforward to fix systematically.

Checkout flows. Only 11% of cart and checkout pages meet minimum WCAG standards. Multi-step checkouts introduce form fields, address selectors, payment inputs, and confirmation screens — each with multiple opportunities for labelling failures, keyboard traps, and focus management issues. The checkout is where the transaction happens, which makes it where the legal exposure is highest.

Product filters and sorting controls. Interactive filtering — by size, colour, price range, category — is often built with custom components that don't work with keyboard navigation or screen readers. A sighted user clicks a dropdown. A blind user hears nothing.

Cart widgets and modals. Side-panel carts and pop-up modals are a common source of focus trapping — exactly what Priya encountered. When a modal opens, keyboard and screen reader focus must move into it and be contained there until the user closes it intentionally. Most custom cart implementations get this wrong.

Pop-ups and interstitials. Email capture overlays, discount offer banners, and exit-intent pop-ups frequently lack accessible close buttons, trap keyboard focus, and cannot be dismissed by keyboard users. Every app that adds a pop-up is a potential violation.

Review and ratings widgets. Third-party review apps are among the most common accessibility failures on Shopify stores. Star rating inputs built with images, unlabelled form fields, and pagination that doesn't work without a mouse appear across thousands of stores using the same apps.

The EU Angle — Now Relevant for Any Store Selling Into Europe

If you sell to customers in Europe, there's a second legal framework to know about. The European Accessibility Act became fully enforceable in June 2025. It requires any business selling digital products or services to EU customers to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards. Non-compliance carries fines and, in some member states, removal from the market.

This matters for Shopify store owners who may not have considered it: if your store ships to the UK, Germany, France, or anywhere else in Europe, EU accessibility requirements now apply to you. We covered the WCAG standard itself in detail in WCAG 2.2 Explained: What It Actually Means for Your Business.

The Overlay Trap — A Specific Warning for Ecommerce

The temptation to install an accessibility widget — a toolbar that claims to automatically fix accessibility issues — is particularly strong for busy store owners who want a quick resolution. It's worth understanding clearly why this creates more exposure, not less.

22.6% of all ADA website lawsuits targeted sites that had accessibility widgets or overlays installed. Overlays don't fix underlying code. They patch over it, often badly. Installing one can increase your exposure — it signals awareness of an obligation and a choice to take a shortcut rather than address the actual problems.

Courts have now seen enough overlay cases to treat them as evidence of bad faith, not good faith. We covered this in more detail in Why Accessibility Overlays Are Getting Businesses Sued.

What Demonstrating Good-Faith Effort Actually Looks Like

No scan, audit, or monitoring service can guarantee that a store will never face a claim. What matters — both legally and in practice — is documented evidence of genuine effort to identify and fix accessibility issues.

For an ecommerce store, that means:

Running a real scan. Not a manual spot-check, not an overlay, but an automated scan of the actual pages customers use — product pages, category pages, the cart, the checkout. Tested against WCAG 2.2, not 2.1. For Shopify stores, this should include pages with apps loaded — violations introduced by third-party scripts need to be caught the same way your customers encounter them.

Fixing the critical issues first. Missing alt text on product images, unlabelled checkout form fields, keyboard-inaccessible filters — these are the violations most commonly cited in demand letters. They're also fixable. A developer who knows what to look for can address most critical issues in a working session.

Monitoring after every update. Every time a theme gets updated, an app gets installed, or new products are added, new violations can appear. Automated monitoring means you're alerted when something breaks — before a customer notices, and before a plaintiff's attorney does.

A store with a recent scan, a remediation history, and active monitoring is in a fundamentally different legal position than one that has never checked. That documentation matters.

This Is About More Than the Lawsuit

Priya found the gift elsewhere. The store kept running. Nobody knew anything had gone wrong.

But there are 7.6 million Americans with visual disabilities who shop online. There are 26 million Americans with hearing loss. There are tens of millions more with motor impairments, cognitive differences, and other disabilities that affect how they interact with websites. Every one of them is a real customer — and every barrier your store creates is a real person who couldn't complete their purchase.

The lawsuit is the legal consequence of building a store that excludes people. The store you could be running instead is one that works for everyone who wants to buy from you.

That's the actual opportunity.

See how your store scores — free accessibility scan, no sign-up required.
[Run your free scan → https://accessbridge.app/demo]

A note from Laura: A lot of what I know about how disabled shoppers actually experience ecommerce comes from disability-led researchers and advocates who've been documenting these barriers for years. If you're a blind shopper, a wheelchair user, or anyone who lives with the daily reality of inaccessible ecommerce — I'd genuinely like to hear what we've missed or got wrong.

Sources

AccessBridge identifies accessibility issues to support your remediation process. We are not a law firm and do not provide legal advice or guarantee legal compliance.